WILD LIGHT SORRENTO

The sea is always untamed when I come to the peninsula, like it’s working through something it can't shake. Its breath stitched with salt and temper, its voice low and rolling, like something remembering pain.

Down at the rocky beach at Sorrento, the afternoon light sifted through a gauze of mist, hanging like hesitation. The kind of light that doesn’t show up in photos, but settles in the bones. It caught on the tidepools and turned them silver, quicksilver, like the moment before stillness becomes silence. The sea heaved, pushing its weight against the shore and swallowing it back again.

Out past the reef, a few yachts slipped along the channel, bone-white sails against the bruised blue. I watched them one by one until they vanished. Not behind anything, just gone. Like the horizon had decided it was done holding them.

Closer in, two lone fishermen stood waist-deep on the sandbar, casting lines without urgency. I looked away for a moment, and when I turned back, they too were gone. No boat, no movement, no sign. Vanished into the swell like memory into sleep.

The sky was shifting, like a painting in progress. Strawberry one moment, steel the next. Long, low clouds moved with purpose, while high wisps barely stirred... a metaphor for something I mused.

Light bounced off the water, scattering in startled directions, catching in the rock pools and pooling gold in the creases of the boulders. It felt like a fleeting thought, one that slips away before it can be fully grasped.

Mornington has always traded in mood and breeze. It messes with my hair and clears my head.

I stooped to pick up a stone, small, smooth, blue-grey like the sky before a storm. Turned it in my hand. Slipped it into my pocket. A quiet contract. Yes, I was here.

Check out the close-up!

Oil on stretched canvas / 40 x 40cm / framed in Tasmanian oak and ready to hang.

* This painting is still drying and will not ship until early June 2025